as seen: January 2010

A: Name a writer/thinker and a piece of writing that you see as being transformative to your outlook. Try to describe how it changed your ideas about the world and yourself.

Lorrie Moore's Self-Help changed the way I want to communicate with the world. So many sentences in her collection of short stories made me wish that I had written them. There's an honesty in her sentences, a disruptiveness that is more alive than many narratives I have read in the past. I remember this once sentence about prying popcorn out of your teeth with the tip of your tongue that knocked me off my feet. The words she had chosen were so perfect and so real that, without thinking, I simulated the act just because the image she'd created was so truthful and, in its shocking randomness, so real. Reading Self-Help made me so aware of those types of details--details a reader or a viewer doesn't realize is part of them or part of what they do until someone else points it out.

In terms of a more direct connection to my photography, the early chapters of On Photography really impacted my understanding of photography. The connection she draw between photography and hunting is so provocative to me: photography as a sensory safari, capturing the world, the shift in power. It's one that she refers back to in her later essay, "Heroics of Vision," but it is much stronger in the beginning of the book.

She writes: "A camera is sold as a predatory weapon--one that's as automated as possible, ready to spring... Still, there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed." (p. 14)

B: Name a visual artist and/or a body of work that you find yourself emulating as you attempt to make photographs. Identify a photograph of this artist or from the body of work and one you have made that supports this connection.

Sally Mann's photographs, especially her series Immediate Family have really stuck with me. I love the connection between the viewer and the subject, the eye contact she captures is so gritty and innocent and trustworthy and jaded all at once. Here is an example:

I love photographs with people in them. Although I don't deny that photographs without people can be narratively rich, the narrative feels so much more personal, important and substantial when the photograph has a person in it. These in no way need to be portraits, even the smallest of people in the background allows a photograph to tug on me. I'm not sure exactly why this is--perhaps it has to do with writing and my love for creating characters.

Here are two of my photographs which inspire narrative for me because of their use of figures:

C: Describe what you think are the most important elements of photographic representation--that is, what could not be taken away from the process, what is essential to defining a photograph a photograph.

I like the point Sontag brings up in "Heroics of Vision" about the viewer always trying to find the "real world" in a photograph. As abstract as photographs get I think it is their connection to the real world that is important. Obviously photographs cannot be taken as truth or absolute or reality, but it is their tie to the world in which we inhabit--at times strong and at times very delicate--that makes photographs so fascinating for me. That is what makes viewers look at a photograph, whether it be the utter realness they see in a photo or the absurdity of something that "cannot be real," the fact that photographs are always captures of life and the very concrete world around us is the most important element of a photograph in my opinion.

D: Four photographs that best articulate my interests at this point in time.

the stillness of snowstorms is one that poets and painters--all lyricists really--love to point out. but what I find even more striking is how snowstorms emphasize the difference between the indoors and the outdoors. as a little girl I remember watching snowstorms from behind windowsills, stilled by the idea of watching something freezing cold and unfathomably white and infinite from the comfort of a living room. while the indoors were warm, concrete and dim in the muted morning light, the outdoors seemed alien, hidden beneath something that, when only a flake, melted on the tip of your nose and seemed smaller than dust.

using the camera to focus on this gulf between the outdoors and the indoors during a snow storm proved fulfilling but also complicating: like our own eyes--our own selves--the camera struggles to compromise the piercing brightness of a snowy afternoon with the muted existence of the indoors. I'm left wondering whether it is that idea of stillness that we feel most during a snowstorm, or the reassurance of being inside, watching it all become white around us?